On the heels of a law signed last year by President Barack Obama limiting sentences for crack cocaine offenses, thousands of prisoners for crimes related to the drug will be eligible for early release, the U.S. Sentencing Commission ruled Thursday.

More than 12,000 prisoners nationwide who have been convicted of felony crimes related to the possession, sale and trafficking of crack could have their sentences reduced in light of the decision, which piggybacks off the Fair Sentencing Act.

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POLITICO 44

The law, which more closely aligns recommended sentences for crack to those for powder cocaine and which was signed last August, didn’t automatically apply to people already imprisoned on crack charges, but members of the commission thought it should.

“I believe that the commission has no choice but to make this right,” said Ketanji Brown Jackson, a vice chairwoman of the panel, The Associated Press reported. “I say justice demands this result.”

The six-member panel voted unanimously in favor of reducing sentences, and its decision is final unless Congress chooses to intervene before the end of October.

The average sentence reduction is expected to be about three years, the commission said in its analysis leading up to the vote. A judge will have to approve each sentence reduction and it applies only to people in federal prisons, not state facilities. In all, the Bureau of Prisons could save $200 million in the first five years by shortening sentences.

Thursday’s vote was not without opposition, though. Ahead of it, 15 House and Senate Republicans wrote to the commission to say that the Fair Sentencing Act was only meant to benefit future offenders, and not others.

Readers' Comments (6)

Chicago-style politics again. Trawl through the prisons and graveyards looking for "first-time" voters. Amnesty for illegal alien voters will be next. If you do not support these measures, you are racist. Do it for the children.

On June 17, 1971, President Nixon told Congress that "if we cannot destroy the drug menace in America, then it will surely destroy us." After forty years of trying to destroy "the drug menace in America" we still *haven't* been able to destroy it and it still *hasn't* destroyed us. Four decades is long enough to realize that on this incredibly important issue, President Nixon was wrong! All actions taken as a result of his invalid and paranoid assumptions (e.g. the federal marijuana prohibition) should be ended immediately!

It makes no sense for taxpayers to fund the federal marijuana prohibition when it *doesn't* prevent people from using marijuana and it *does* make criminals incredibly wealthy and incite the Mexican drug cartels to murder thousands of people every year.

We need legal adult marijuana sales in supermarkets, gas stations and pharmacies for exactly the same reason that we need legal alcohol and tobacco sales - to keep unscrupulous black-market criminals out of our neighborhoods and away from our children. Marijuana must be made legal to sell to adults everywhere that alcohol and tobacco are sold.

"There's something extraordinarily perverse when we're so concerned about preventing addicts from having access to drugs that we destroy the lives of many times more people, either through untreated pain or other drug war damage".

The expected ignorant comments by the rightwingers. The self righteous drug war and draconian sentencing has not helped the drug problem, things are worse.

In 1980 there were just under 25,000 people in prison for drug offenses we now have 350,000 in prison for drug offenses. Drug usage is not down. Of course putting people in prison has become a business as it has become more and more privatized. So you have to keep the population high and growing to keep the money flowing.